Another New Academic Year Begins

It was great to see all our new students arriving this past weekend, and it was especially energizing today to see the combination of these new students settling in and our continuing students joining them and all getting ready for first day of class on Wednesday.

Now I just worry whether we really have the Library completely ready for the new academic year. We hope so. We have spent time making some changes that we hope will make the Proctor Library a more customer friendly space as the semester begins, and one of our primary goals for the coming year is to continue improving our customer service in order to improve overall student satisfaction and the quality of the educational experience.

Returning students will notice a couple of significant physical changes we have made inside the Library. Many students who have already been here several years have often been faced with trying to locate a book in one of two very similar locations—the Dewey Collection or the LC Circulating Collection. This was necessary as we worked through a project lasting close to nine years whereby we converted nearly 100,000 book volumes from the Dewey Decimal Classification system to the Library of Congress Classification system. Well, we finally completed that long project this summer, and we have trashed the old signs for the two locations.


And we have installed new signs for the single location which is now known as the “2nd Floor General Collection.” The signs read simply “General Collection.

To support the Education program at the College we also made some adjustments this summer to two of the special collections supporting this program. First we acquired copies of those textbooks in math, science and social studies formally adopted by the St. Johns County Public Schools to support the K-5 grades. Naturally these very useful textbooks overcrowded the existing shelving holding the special “Education-Curriculum Collection” on the second floor, so this entire collection was then relocated to available shelving nearby on the side wall. This in turn allowed us to spread out the already crowded books in the “Fran Farrell Children’s Literature Collection” and make that collection more user friendly.

The actual locations of these collections can be seen on our new Second Floor Floorplan http://www.flagler.edu/library/Library_2nd_floor.jpg .


Finally, one of the changes that we believe will appreciated most by both new and returning students was really accomplished by our great friends and colleagues, the Technology Services Department—probably more widely known as the IT or Information Technology Department. Students visiting the Proctor Library this week will find some 200 brand new computers installed early this summer—about 70 new computers on the first floor and about 130 on the third floor. The Library is especially pleased because the number on the first floor were increased by 9 units over last year's number. This increase should help reduce the “cruising” we often observed last year, as students searched for an open computer. Thanks Technology Services for such great and caring support.